One of my goals in this blog is to add perspectives from many people on how depression has affected their lives, either in their own depression diagnosis or those of the people they love. To this end, I interviewed Brandon, a friend Kody and I went to high school with.
Brandon’s story about depression starts out a lot like Kody’s. He excelled in school. Almost every subject came easily for him, and he did well without much effort. The subject he struggled with most was English, which meant applying for scholarships to help out with college tuition was an extra challenge.
After graduation, his parents were able to put him through a few semesters of college, but after that money ran out, college became an impossible pursuit. This is when Brandon says the depression began to set in. There were further challenges after his mother’s divorce and their subsequent move further out of town. Brandon had to get a job to help out with family expenses, but the distance from town made taking a bus impossible and he and his mother shared a car. This meant his only options were minimum wage part time jobs. At the same time, he felt the pressure of expectations as he had excelled in school, but wasn’t amounting to anything.
His treatment for the depression that was building was further complicated by his mother’s approach to depression. She didn’t believe in medication to treat depression and her religious views suggested that talking to a church counselor. Brandon says talking to this particular person caused him to come, “to the realization that if everything is God’s plan, then making me suffer (was) a part of it.” His loss of faith in Christianity caused a lot more disagreements with his mother eventually causing her to lose her temper in an argument and telling him to “just do it then,” when when he talked to her about how hopeless he felt and how much he wanted to die.
Eventually, Brandon was given a chance to go live with his father instead. However, the environment wasn’t too much more supportive to helping him with his struggle with depression. His father had difficulties connecting to his emotions since he’d been raised in a military family and had been taught that a man should hide their emotions and push past it. His step mom also had trouble understanding what was going on and talked behind his back about it.
At this point, Brandon was on state insurance and so when he tried to get help from a therapist he found himself on a six month waitlist. His father was able to see how serious the problem was by this point, but couldn’t help much as Brandon wasn’t able to get on his insurance for faster access to care. Luckily, he was able to bridge the worst parts of this time period by calling Suicide Hotline when the feelings became too much. They were able to refer him to Compass Health, but there were still more months before anyone could see him. Once he saw a therapist, he was then referred to a psychiatrist. So he waited on another six month list.
After all of the delays, Brandon finally was able to see a psychiatrist and finally able to start getting on antidepressants. The journey for him just to find a diagnosis and to begin treatment for his depression took over a year in all. It was further delayed by built in attitudes in the people around him that come from old approaches to depression. No one is to blame in this situation as the attitudes people in his life exhibited aren’t uncommon. This is part of why sharing stories like this one are so important.
As with Kody, the diagnosis was just the very beginning of Brandon’s story. Finding the medication to actually treat his depression was a whole other journey.